3 ms·

Comparing one of the core strategic resources of any society (energy) and microsoft office suite in the same sentence is a bit silly no? Microsoft Word is abso

Comparing one of the core strategic resources of any society (energy) and microsoft office suite in the same sentence is a bit silly no? Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success. You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine, minus some banal feature gaps in LibreOffice/etc. Nobody will die in the winter and there will be no food shortages (EU is fertilizer dependent) if Microsoft shuts off your access to creating PowerPoints. The fact that there’s more effort being put into building EU alternatives for Microsoft Office than energy security, tells you how unserious and out of touch the political class truly is. And Microsoft office is just the very very top of the stack (the easiest to vibe code alternatives to). What about the operating systems, the hardware, for which there is no EU alternative for? And it’s not just the US you need to worry about, all of computing depends on physical manufacturing in China/Taiwan. China could cut off access tomorrow and there’d be no more computers/phones/comms infrastructure/etc. That’s an actual real threat. As someone living in the EU, the saber rattling for domestic political points between the US and the EU is one of the dumbest memes and is resulting is real tax money being spent on the silliest of projects. Migrating off microsoft while their entire business model is being made irrelevant by AI, being one of them. Meanwhile, the stuff that actually matters for sovereignty and isn't surface level BS is of course ignored (energy, resources, mining) in favor of handouts to companies for domestic manufacturing of weapons that aren't even relevant for modern war.

sajithdilshan 2mo ago
Unfortunately you're singing to deaf ears. I totally agree with you regarding the current drama about EU sovereignty. Being sovereign is amazing, but at the moment EU is doing it for all the wrong reasons. It's more like cut dependency on US while moving towards China and I wonder what kind of a sovereignty that is. Also I saw the other day an announcement from NextCloud that they can now run the new Euro office or whatever its called on their cloud, and that would have been exciting if we were living in 2010. What's happening is that all those private companies are getting tax payers money from EU to come-up with some janky alternative to a US software and label it as sovereign and pocket the money. It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI
- dewey 2mo ago
  > It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI You don't have to pick. The people working on office suites and negotiating government contracts are not the same people that work on frontier AI.
  - sajithdilshan 2mo ago
    I think you're missing the point. It's not about who is working on what, but the tax payers money is being wasted that could have been used for a better purpose. If they switch to a new office suite, that's millions of Euros wasted on migration, training people to use and building all the existing processes and flows around it.
    - dewey 2mo ago
      That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon? Example from Germany (https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2025/cds/251204_cds_open-source https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe...), that county moved to LibreOffice and previously spent 15 millionen euros on licenses, the migration was 9 million. Why do you think many countries like the US try to divest from China and even move some manufacturing back?
      - sajithdilshan 2mo ago
        > Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees I agree, with this point, but you really have to answer, is migrating an office suite does that? Non of those office suites are developed within Germany, they are open source solutions. Also what kind of economic growth would you expect from building an army of developers to maintain and build an offie suite? At least train them for the technologies of the future, not for some outdated one of last decade. Further, after the migration who is going to fix bugs? provide support, also implement new features and keep the office suite modernized and maintain backwards compatibility throughout? All these topics would cost money, that's a reason why the MS license costs that much. People this just because everything is migrated to LibreOffice it's done and it's a one time task. Imagine this migration happened in 2010, and back then it was oracle open office. Like, then would these computers still be stuck in that outdated office version till 2026? Otherwise who is doing the auto updates? Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?
nbadg 2mo ago
This shows a profound ignorance for how much of modern life, especially within a bureaucracy, is powered by banal software like office suites. If you can cripple the everyday workings of government, even temporarily, by shutting off access to Microsoft word, then that is a serious security concern. End of story.
- pembrook 2mo ago
  I get it, for a forum of people who build software for a living, it's upsetting to confront the idea that the stuff you make doesn't actually matter that much, especially in a post-AI world. Hell, even pre-AI you can just install LibreOffice and it will functionally be the same. But honestly, if we're comparing ENERGY and FERTILIZER to productivity software, it's no contest as to which is more important for the functioning of modern life. You cannot vibe code your way out of an energy shortage or switch to 'open-source' fertilizer as soon as tomorrow.
  - wasmitnetzen 2mo ago
    You cannot vibe code your way out of 30+ years of institutional knowledge and processes built on Microsoft Office either.
    - graemep 2mo ago
      Given how fragile unreliable those processes are, you probably can without doing much damage. Its not like replacing good quality software with something vibe coded.
dewey 2mo ago
> You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine. Have you missed the news where multiple countries tried to do exactly that and it took either multiple tries or was abandoned? This is very deeply engrained in government and corporate networks (For good reasons like support, backwards compatibility, staffing etc.) but it's not something you can change over night like replacing your parents computer with a Linux version with a similar GUI and hoping all will be fine.
- PhilipRoman 2mo ago
  It's very difficult to do it smoothly with no downtime, but all it takes is one emergency for the existing workflows to be thrown out. Companies suffer emergencies and data losses all the time and nothing ever actually happens, they get over it.
mariusor 2mo ago
> Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success I think you might be underestimating a tad the dependency of bureaucracies on, you know, office software. Maybe word processing is not paramount, but every large organization will have an excel spreadsheat or two that takes tens of hours of work to replicate by hand alone. Will their absence make the economy crumble? Probably not, but it will definitely throw sand in the already grinding gears of German public service.

sajithdilshan 2mo ago

Unfortunately you're singing to deaf ears. I totally agree with you regarding the current drama about EU sovereignty. Being sovereign is amazing, but at the moment EU is doing it for all the wrong reasons. It's more like cut dependency on US while moving towards China and I wonder what kind of a sovereignty that is. Also I saw the other day an announcement from NextCloud that they can now run the new Euro office or whatever its called on their cloud, and that would have been exciting if we were living in 2010. What's happening is that all those private companies are getting tax payers money from EU to come-up with some janky alternative to a US software and label it as sovereign and pocket the money. It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI

dewey 2mo ago
> It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI You don't have to pick. The people working on office suites and negotiating government contracts are not the same people that work on frontier AI.
- sajithdilshan 2mo ago
  I think you're missing the point. It's not about who is working on what, but the tax payers money is being wasted that could have been used for a better purpose. If they switch to a new office suite, that's millions of Euros wasted on migration, training people to use and building all the existing processes and flows around it.
  - dewey 2mo ago
    That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon? Example from Germany (https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2025/cds/251204_cds_open-source https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe...), that county moved to LibreOffice and previously spent 15 millionen euros on licenses, the migration was 9 million. Why do you think many countries like the US try to divest from China and even move some manufacturing back?
    - sajithdilshan 2mo ago
      > Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees I agree, with this point, but you really have to answer, is migrating an office suite does that? Non of those office suites are developed within Germany, they are open source solutions. Also what kind of economic growth would you expect from building an army of developers to maintain and build an offie suite? At least train them for the technologies of the future, not for some outdated one of last decade. Further, after the migration who is going to fix bugs? provide support, also implement new features and keep the office suite modernized and maintain backwards compatibility throughout? All these topics would cost money, that's a reason why the MS license costs that much. People this just because everything is migrated to LibreOffice it's done and it's a one time task. Imagine this migration happened in 2010, and back then it was oracle open office. Like, then would these computers still be stuck in that outdated office version till 2026? Otherwise who is doing the auto updates? Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?

nbadg 2mo ago

This shows a profound ignorance for how much of modern life, especially within a bureaucracy, is powered by banal software like office suites. If you can cripple the everyday workings of government, even temporarily, by shutting off access to Microsoft word, then that is a serious security concern. End of story.

pembrook 2mo ago
I get it, for a forum of people who build software for a living, it's upsetting to confront the idea that the stuff you make doesn't actually matter that much, especially in a post-AI world. Hell, even pre-AI you can just install LibreOffice and it will functionally be the same. But honestly, if we're comparing ENERGY and FERTILIZER to productivity software, it's no contest as to which is more important for the functioning of modern life. You cannot vibe code your way out of an energy shortage or switch to 'open-source' fertilizer as soon as tomorrow.
- wasmitnetzen 2mo ago
  You cannot vibe code your way out of 30+ years of institutional knowledge and processes built on Microsoft Office either.
  - graemep 2mo ago
    Given how fragile unreliable those processes are, you probably can without doing much damage. Its not like replacing good quality software with something vibe coded.

dewey 2mo ago

> You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine. Have you missed the news where multiple countries tried to do exactly that and it took either multiple tries or was abandoned? This is very deeply engrained in government and corporate networks (For good reasons like support, backwards compatibility, staffing etc.) but it's not something you can change over night like replacing your parents computer with a Linux version with a similar GUI and hoping all will be fine.

PhilipRoman 2mo ago
It's very difficult to do it smoothly with no downtime, but all it takes is one emergency for the existing workflows to be thrown out. Companies suffer emergencies and data losses all the time and nothing ever actually happens, they get over it.

mariusor 2mo ago

> Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success I think you might be underestimating a tad the dependency of bureaucracies on, you know, office software. Maybe word processing is not paramount, but every large organization will have an excel spreadsheat or two that takes tens of hours of work to replicate by hand alone. Will their absence make the economy crumble? Probably not, but it will definitely throw sand in the already grinding gears of German public service.